Hopefully everyone's heard about it, here's the site if not. Essentially, you donate games and game systems (and movies and books) that are provided for children in hospital cancer wards. I'm thinking of donating this year.

On the one hand, hospitals are horrible places, especially if you have to spend your time there over the holidays. And I can only imagine what these kids are going through with their treatments and so forth. I know one person (a grown man, but that's not really the point) who just underwent both radiation therapy and, when that wasn't sufficient, an extensive, life-altering operation to remove cancer from his neck. It is not a good time.

I can testify to the distractionary (at least) and enlightening (at best) values games provide. They were talking about Child's Play on the 1up Yours podcast this week, and describing how a father and son sharing a game of Mario can return a certain amount of normalcy to otherwise hard times, and I agree wholeheartedly.

Now, on the other hand, if one has limited resources available to share in a charitable fashion, is this where you'd want to place your weight? If we think big-picture, wouldn't it be more beneficial to support, say, cancer research? Get to the root of the issue?

I've donated to Child's Play for the past several years. The only real downside I see to it is that all the toys and games are bought at retail -- it seems to me if the charity can raise a million a year, it should be able to buy wholesale, thereby increasing the value of the donations.

But your question about what charities are best to donate to is one that I've wrestled with. For instance, should I be donating to my locale NPR radio station? Is that really as important as, say, famine relief or medical research? And are toys really what our hospitals need or do they need money so that they can take care of building maintenance, equipment upgrades and staffing?

I just got finished watching the tv series Sports Night last week and there's an episode where one of the main characters goes around asking everyone who they donate money to because he can't decide which charities to support. In the end, the answer he gets is, "You're not going to solve everybody's problems. In fact, you're not gonna solve anybody's problems. So you know what you should do? Anything. As much of it and as often as you can."